The Biological Research Core (BRC) will provide all four Research Projects with technical and personnel support for facilitating, standardizing, and implementing the collection, management and analysis of tissue samples. The BRC will support investigators by providing animals for individual experiments, collecting animal and human tissue samples and performing standardized testing and data management (record keeping). The BRC intends to aid each project by providing technical, instrumental and personnel support which are (i) commonly used by several projects, or (ii) occasionally used by investigators but require special technical or safety regulations, or (iii) require special equipment or technical experience. The BRC facility is composed of three major Core units. The Animal Care Core Unit keeps rabbits, performs pretreatment and post-treatments of animals that are used for the experiments, as well as sacrifices animals and collects and distributes tissue samples. The Tissue Procurement and Sample Analysis Core Unit will support the Projects by collecting human intervertebral discs from cadaveric donors and from the operating rooms of Rush University Medical Center. This Unit will perform MRI on human tissues for the detection of disc degeneration. Disc samples then will be evaluated and prepared for specialized biochemical analyses, histology tests, and prepared for storage. The Cell and Tissue Culture Core Unit will prepare tissues for cell isolation and culturing. This Unit will generate and maintain a computer database to catalog all animals, and animal and human tissues with their appropriate test records. The BRC will provide an economy of effort and reduce the overall cost of individual projects while creating a higher level of cooperation among the individual projects. The coordination and integration of the tissue appropriation, culture facilities and histology and biochemistry laboratories creates more flexibility and efficiency for allocating laboratory, technical and personnel resources to support the individual Projects and address the urgent needs of individual projects at critical times. The success of a multidisciplinary core facility, due to its service function is less noticeable than that of the individual research projects. However, without this facility, the individual projects would all spend more time and effort in performing the same tasks, e.g. organizing tissue procurement, analyzing tissues and establishing/developing new methods.